A Field Guide to the Invisible - Hardcover

Biddle, Wayne

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0805050698 ISBN 13: 9780805050691

Publisher: Henry Holt and Co., 1998

Synopsis

In this witty and captivating blend of science, humor, metaphysics, and popular culture, a Pulitzer Prize-winning author catalogs the invisible sphere that surrounds us.

Much of everyday experience takes place beyond the range of our senses. And in our contemporary predicament, where so much seems beyond personal control, what is invisible generates an index of what we are. A Field Guide to the Invisible is a layman's guide to the inescapable stew we're in, a thought-provoking catalogue of life's ingredients that are literally out of sight and therefore too often out of mind.

In medieval times, everyone knew the air was rife with menacing spirits--the souls of unbaptized babies, graveyard ghouls, winged demons who could rip the unwary from the world of the senses. In our own age of chronic low-dose exposure to sundry radiations; of infections from exotic microbes; of a biosphere so radically changed by the hand of man that the natural protections it once provided are no longer assured, it is still the invisible that worries us most. A Field Guide to the Invisible maps points in a parallel world, ignored at our peril, that we inhabit simultaneously with the one before our very eyes.

About this title

About the Author

Wayne Biddle is also the author of Dark Side of the Moon, about the Nazi "rocket scientist" Wernher von Braun; Barons of the Sky, a history of the American aviation weapons industry; and A Field Guide to Germs.  He teaches at Johns Hopkins University.

Reviews

A resoundingly fun if sometimes unappetizing inquiry into the world of microbes, germs, and other invisible but influential phenomena. Popular-science writer Biddle (A Field Guide to Germs, 1995) here offers an Allergens-to-Zeitgeist series of smallish essays, necessarily severe distillations, about the things that lie beyond our immediate senses and are thus not only out of sight but out of mind. He delights in turning up little facts that make fine fuel for did-you-know party conversation: The average adult, for instance, breathes 13.5 kilograms of air each day, about four times more in weight than the food and water he or she ingests; if all photosynthesis were to cease tomorrow, the Earth would still have an 8,000-year supply of oxygen; if you turn your back to the wind, low pressure will always be to your left side, high pressure to your right; a scream can indeed make someones ``blood run cold,'' inasmuch as loud noises can lower blood pressure and heart rate. Along the way he addresses such matters of perennial interest as farts, burps, and cooties (the first the product of nefarious methanogens, the last the horrible bearers of typhus, to say nothing of schoolboy terrors), and he urges that such things be not too much feared; as he writes in the instance of bad breath, bacteria . . . cannot be escaped, household disinfectants notwithstanding. . . . Nothing is more natural than meeting a microbe. Its their scene. Its their scene indeed, and Biddle does a fine job of making it meaningful to his readers. Biddles book adds up to little more than an assemblage of scientific and cultural factoids and gross-out triviawhich makes it just right for bright teenagers of an inquiring bent, and for collectors of useless information everywhere. (b&w illustrations, not seen) -- Copyright ©1998, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Biddle's "field guides" are the ideal conveyances of scientific information for readers leery of "serious" science books. Germs were the subject of his first guide; in his second, he explores more forms of the invisible in a set of short essays on intriguing topics, such as allergens, bad breath, gamma rays, and no-see-ums. Biddle defines the invisible as "everything going around and through us that we not only can't see, but can't do much about anyway." This statement hints at the subtext of his book, his awareness of and concern over the toxins pumped into the environment, but his delight in the magic of the invisible realm keeps things light. As Biddle explains radiation, for instance, he states cheerily that we absorb more radiation snuggling with a loved one than "we would get lounging against a nuclear reactor." So agile is Biddle, he works in concise histories of key scientific theories without once losing his momentum. Donna Seaman

Edition details

• Publisher: Henry Holt and Co.
• Publication date: 1998
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0805050698
• ISBN 13: 9780805050691
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 208